This invention relates in general to digital video player systems and, more specifically, to an apparatus and methods for allowing digital manipulation of video information.
Digital video playback is available in consumer products. For example, digital versatile disks (DVD) are optical disks which store videos in compressed digital form. The MPEG2 codec is used to compress the video such that a whole movie can fit onto a single five and a quarter inch optical disk.
DVD video players retrieve the digital video, decompress it and convert it to analog video for display on a television. The DVD player has other functions that control the playback such as pause, rewind and fast-forward which are similar to those functions on a video cassette player (VCP). The television allows adjusting the quality of the video displayed. The analog video signal is adjusted by the television to control things such as color, brightness, contrast, sharpness, etc. Digital manipulation techniques are desirable in order to improve the quality of the video displayed and to produce additional effects not normally available to televisions that merely adjust the analog video signal.
There are computer workstations that allow editing digital video off-line. In other words, the digital manipulations of the video on are not performed in real-time. The processing required to perform the manipulation takes massive computational resources over a period of time. In order to edit digital video, the user chooses the desired digital manipulation, the digital video is processed over a period of time and the finished product is displayed. Although digital editing techniques are known, it is desirable to perform these manipulations in real-time such that the user can manipulate the digital video as it is played.